We tend to talk a lot about the West in these pages. The Old West. The Wild West. The Great West. The Western Frontier. “Go West, young man.” But Tom Browning’s compass points, as it rightfully should, in another direction entirely—north.

Santa Claus and the North Pole have long fascinated artists of all stripes in the United States and beyond, including famously in the early 20th century, when illustrators such as Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker brought the popular image of the jolly old elf to the masses on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Later it was Haddon Sundblom who, with Coca-Cola, planted the Santa Claus imagery deeply within American culture. With these magnificent artists preceding him, Browning started painting Santa Claus in 1980, but with a novel new twist. 

“The whole idea at that time was to do Santa doing things that adults could identify with. We called it Santa’s Time Off,” Browning says, adding that his first image was Santa on a beach enjoying an off-season vacation in a pair of shorts. “It all started as a fun thing to paint. I did it purely for my own entertainment, just my own satisfaction. The image was eventually picked up a by a publisher that did Christmas cards and prints. I didn’t think it would amount to much, but then the first royalty check arrived and they had done very well with it—I was quite surprised. By the next year they had asked for another design.”Fun in the Saddle, oil, 24 x 19”

Browning did another painting, but then quickly realized he had an opportunity for something bigger, which is why he started his own publishing company, Santa’s Time Off, in 1984 to support the series. His wife, Joyce, managed the new company. “People thought we were crazy for starting a publishing company with just two images, but it felt like it was taking off so we were asking ourselves, ‘Why not become our own publishers?’” says Browning, who now lives and works in Scottsdale, Arizona. “We took it to a trade show up in Seattle and it just took off. It was so unique, and brand-new. The images were Santa doing anything other than delivering toys and being Santa Claus. People loved the novelty of it, and it quickly became part of my studio. Every year I would come up with new designs and then I would just paint them on the side while continuing my fine art career. At one point the company was doubling in size every year. At its peak we had 4,000 accounts. We were sending the images all over the place.”Santa’s Favorite Team, oil, 28 x 38”

In just a couple years Browning’s Santa Claus Christmas cards and prints could be found in stores all around the country. By the 1990s he was licensing the images to other companies to use in their own products, including jigsaw puzzles, wrapping paper, pillows and throws, cookie tins, gift bags and, in the case of the company Possible Dreams, detailed figurines, which were a huge hit. “We produced most of the paper products, but it was the licensing that put us on the map,” the painter says. “Later we did a book of poems [by Bill Maynard] titled Santa’s Time Off and later I did the illustration for The Night Before Christmas, which was the top children’s book on the market.”Sunday Painter, oil, 22 x 28”

One remarkable element to this story is how Browning kept the two segments of his career separate from each other. Every year he would produce one or two new Santa Claus paintings, but it never interfered with the Western work that came out of his studio and it never crossed into his work with the Cowboy Artists of America, of which he’s been a member since 2009. “Those who knew Tom Browning for his fine art had no idea he was doing these depictions of Santa Claus for the commercial market, and those who knew him for his Santas were unaware that he painted anything else,” the gallery notes.

Because the images, in all their various forms, were being published again and again, Browning generally hung onto all of the originals for proofing purposes, but also to protect the exclusivity of the images. “They were always in our control,” he explains. “Every now and again someone would contact us and we’d sell one to a close friend or collector, but we held onto almost all of them, and there were probably more than 200 in all.”All Caught Up, oil, 20 x 24”

Recently, he has revisited a number of the paintings and determined it was time to let them go, to release them back into the world. A large selection of the Santa Claus paintings, some spanning back to the very early days of Browning’s work on the subject, will be available in Santa’s Time Off, a new solo show on November 21 at the Legacy Gallery in Scottsdale. A reception will be held on opening night, from 7 to 9 p.m. The show runs until, fittingly, Christmas day.

The works should be a treat to collectors of Browning’s work: The paintings are whimsical, playful, witty and sensitive to Christmas traditions, and yet they are also done in Browning’s evocative and award-winning painting style. In Santa’s Favorite Team, he paints Santa with a team of reindeer in a snowy scene, while in Special Friends his main subject is feeding the reindeer from a wooden bucket at his feet. Although these works include iconic Christmas themes, these are Western paintings when you substitute horses for reindeer, a stagecoach for the sleigh and a cowboy for Santa. Other works, including All Caught Up, invoke other aspects of the West, including sporting imagery and landscapes. Fun in the Saddle is as Western as it gets, no substitutions required, with Santa clinging valiantly to a bucking horse.

While Santa is the star in all of the paintings, in many of the works the artist also gives St. Nick some mischievous, and miniature, little helpers in the form of tiny elves that scurry about assisting Santa as best they can. In Sunday Painter, while Santa paints at an easel by a lake, two elves clean his brushes at his feet. A tin pail, the size of a mug for Santa, is as big as a cauldron for the little helpers. In Air Cuisine, the swimsuit-clad elves point up into the sky as Santa tosses pieces of a sandwich toward lingering seagulls. They relay recipe information in A Pinch of Cheer, in which Santa seems to be distracted as he adds a lengthy pour of wine to a pot. These are delightfully silly paintings, and will likely come as a surprise to some of Browning’s fans and collectors.Air Cuisine, oil, 22 x 30”

“I grew up in the 1950s and 1960, when the Coca-Cola Santa was kind of the standard. Haddon Sundblom’s Santas, that’s what he looked like for me. He was the standard-bearer for many people,” Browning says. “But when I started painting Santa I had found my own design of Santa and it stuck with me. It was always fun to put him in these places where people hadn’t seen him before, whether it was on a beach or golfing or whatever. It was always fun to explore the things he would be doing when it wasn’t Christmas.” —

Tom Browning: Santa’s Time Off
November 21-December 25, 2019; reception, Nov. 21, 7-9 p.m.
The Legacy Gallery, 7178 Main Street, Scottsdale, AZ 85251
(480) 945-1113, www.legacygallery.com

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